


The Telling of the Bees

by tempestshakes



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beth Lives, Canon-Typical Violence, Dogs, F/M, Gen, Grady Memorial Hospital, Season/Series 05, Southern Gothic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-14 15:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13010718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tempestshakes/pseuds/tempestshakes
Summary: The fall doesn’t kill her—but she hurts everywhere.





	The Telling of the Bees

**Author's Note:**

> I listened to the [Wind River (Official Motion Picture Soundtrack)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3St9fZRFQ0) religiously while writing this.

__

_ “I will come back from the dead for you.” _

—Richard Siken, _You Are Jeff_

* * *

 

**i.     GIRL OF RUST AND BLOOD**

 

The fall doesn’t kill her—

but she hurts _everywhere._  

Her lungs burn while her fingers slip down into freezing sludge, twitching at the disgusting mucous slip. A blurred pin-prick of light at the top of the long, black vertical tunnel running above her comes slowly into focus. Voices scream from that bit of light and she tries to use her own voice, tries and tries, but can’t catch the breath that ripped out of her when she landed spread eagle on the pile of squish. 

Gunshots burst like fireworks. Someone wails. The possibility that this could be hell runs through her brain before the ache of her bones chases out any other thought in her head. She shuts her eyes to welcome blackness, a few colors fizzing along the landscape of the backs her lids and prays. 

It’s been a while. Since she’s talked to God. Pleaded. Begged. The distant clanging and slamming doors are a poor excuse for a background hymn. 

Then suddenly she inhales and it feels like God let her live only to be stabbed by her own ribs. 

Her eyes shoot open. The light is still there, up and small, an elevator shaft length of distance between her and the people who came to save her. 

Beth shifts her legs, a revolting scent finally reaching her senses as her movements dislodge chunks of whatever softened her fall. Her body sinks deeper into the cold. She lifts a hand with considerable effort and in the dimness sees a dark ribbon of rotting flesh tangled between her fingers, slowly descending down her wrist. It leaves a moist trail like a slug. 

An understanding. Her mouth gapes open; her voice is a rasp from the back of her parched throat. 

_Oh God._

She shifts her head around. She’s on a hill of decomposing bodies flowing down and out into the bluish darkness, and she's enclosed on all sides except to her right where a door must’ve been, but only a shadowy hall greets her now. There’s a thunderous clang somewhere out in the cavernous gloom and moaning echoes. Walkers. 

She needs to move. With a pained groan, Beth lifts her chest out of the muck while swinging her legs to the side. She slides a few inches down the hill, her hip bumping into a something metal. Her hand runs over the object and the shape reveals itself to be a gun.

It’s the one that fell…before she fell…before. Beth swivels around, accidentally slipping further and trying to stop, grabbing at bone jutting out, and frantically peering around. 

There. In the corner where the light barely reaches: a pair of legs clothed in police issue slacks and boots, a torso twisted in the opposite direction, and an attached head staring straight up at the open elevator doors as if waiting for rescue, chin resting against the wall at an angle so severe the woman’s entire neck lay flush against the cement. 

It was Officer Dawn who pulled her down. Officer Dawn who, desperate after the miraculous appearance of Beth’s long-lost clan, grabbed her wrist, and Beth retaliated by releasing the pair of scissors she kept hidden in her cast. She grasped them tightly and pivoted, the scissors ripping into the skin of Dawn’s neck. Dawn screeched, took three steps backward too many, and dragged them both into the hell pit. 

Beth remembers. Can recall her own scream and how she looked back down the hall just in time to see _him_ barreling down the hallway, free hand outstretched, hollering her name so wildly she couldn’t even recognize the sound. 

Her fingers miss his by an eternity, pass the ledge, and she remembers flying. Then, came the black. 

She needs to _move_. Everyone above’ll assume the fall killed her, and if the sound of scuffling is anything to go by, walkers finding her out is a sure possibility, so she nixes screaming for help. 

Grabbing the gun, Beth wriggles down the hill towards Dawn’s body, desperately trying to keep her head above the human juices. Grimacing, she feels around the cop’s twisted body for her weapon and anything else of use. Beth tucks a flashlight into her left boot and the baton into the waistband of her pants and starts shuffling back over the hill, a gun in each hand until her boots slide out on the slick flooring and her knees hit concrete. Gasping, she crawls away in pained haste. She manages to stand up with the help of chain link blocking pipes just outside the shaft, but it’s a stupid thing to do because the jangling of metal against metal reverberates like a dinner bell down the hall.

“Shit. Shit—“ Beth scurries forward, skidding on a grease stain, and flattens herself against the corner to peer around at the possible incoming threat. Her body, filled with fear and aching, thrums, and worst of all there’s a prick of hope stinging her heart so that it sounds louder and louder. Until she can’t hear a thing over it. Until her breaths are coming out in pants and she’s feeling the distressed energy take over her brain. 

_Calm,_ she says to herself. _Breath. Breath, Beth. Calm it._

Blinking to help clear the sweat pouring over her brow and into her eyes, she clenches her fists and forces her breathing to slow and deepen. She curls her tongue into a little ‘u’ shape, just the way Shaun used to tell her to, and lets the oxygen run across. It’s a trick that cools the inhaled air. She makes herself focus. Makes herself feel it in her lungs. 

The moaning grows closer. Beth replaces the flashlight with one pistol, tucking the gun just into the top of her boot, and points the light out into the gloom, pistol barrel resting on her good wrist. She lights up the wall just outside the elevator, taking care to ignore the pile of dead things that softened her fall, and easily spots a map of the building level. According to the sign, the nearest and most probable exit is only three short halls away, and the next likely exit is one extremely long hallway past that. The rest of the map is illegible due to the amount of dried blackish-brown spray pattern coating as if someone thew paint up against the wall for an art project gone wrong. 

With the information stored in her brain, Beth quickly flashes the light on for no more than second around the corner and counts three walkers before the next turn. She shuts her eyes one last time, takes a breath that fills her lungs to the brim, and then steps out from behind turn. The geeks, incensed by the flash of light, growl and she can hear their slow, determined shuffle towards her. 

Another flash of light and _BANG._ Points in the direction of the next walker, flash, and then _BANG_ and _BANG._ Beth moves as quietly as her limping and beaten body can, exhaling the last of the big breath. Inhales deeply again, and flashes the light. 

_BANG._  

The fear feels alive inside her chest and leaps with every shot, every gruesome rotting face, every rasp echoing along the corridor like a snake slipping through grass, a danger lurking. 

_BANG. BANG._

Beth accidentally runs into a corner with her funny bone and bites her lip to keep from howling. She does a pirouette and rests against the wall, ears and eyes straining.One more right turn and then a door leading outside should be on her right, but there are so many variables and she has to _find_ it first. 

No sounds of walkers from the hall, but they’re coming—they have to be. Gunshots ring so loud they make the air vibrate. Except she’s covered in rot and old body mush, so maybe they won’t sniff her out in the dark. Maybe she smells like one of them. Maybe she’ll live. 

Beth knows she’s almost to the end of the corridor. Despite running a shoulder against the wall, the door hasn’t made itself known. She weighs the risk of flashing the light to help find it. The light feels heavy in her sweating palm and her breaths sound much too loud, too rough out her nose, and so she opens her mouth and breaths like the stagnant air weighs something. The light’s gamble, but she needs to take it. 

But before her thumb presses the switch, her shoulder jostles against a door frame. Trying not to fall prey to frantic movement, she tucks the flashlight into her armpit and runs her hand against the door, trying to find the handles, not knowing what will happen when she opens the door.

Her hands run into the crash bar. It doesn’t give. 

Beth’s breathing starts to short again and she swears there’s a rustling sound not three yards behind her. Slamming her hips into the bar, she pushes with all her might. The door shrieks. She can almost feel the leathery fingertips ghosting down her neck, and she’s quite literally sobbing now. She slams into the door again. And again. And again with a desperate gasp. 

The bar finally depresses to unlatch the door and it swings open violently. Sunlight, white and fierce, immediately blinds her. Beth trips out of the hospital, a gun hand raised as if asking for mercy, blinking rapidly. Tucking the flashlight into her back pocket, she holds the gun with two hands and squints at the back lot of building. Two dozen or so walkers mill about from all directions, spread and loitering like a field of cattle, some already making steady progress towards her. 

Her chest heaves. Her bones still ache, limbs strung out and bruised, blood crusting and flaking off her skin. She looks like Chao’s pathetic little sister. Fear pulls at her pulse, plays with her veins like they’re banjo strings. 

But. Beth glances up at windows near the top of the hospital building. There, she knows, her family fought—for Carol, for anything good, for the girl they believe they lost to a hell pit. And they probably won because ain’t nobody got teeth and nerve like her family. Nobody. 

They’ll survive.

_I can, too._

Beth blasts the nearest geek; her aim is true. Focuses on the next one. She clips the biceps and viscous membrane flies into the air. Aims again. She makes steady progress across the blacktop, breathing in through her nose, and maintaining a concentration so steady that her sore arms never waver. The gun makes an empty clicking sound and just like that the magazine is emptied. She tosses it aside and grabs the second pistol from her boot like it’s a dance.

She was a ballerina once. Her pink leotard came with a droopy tutu and her ballet slippers came used from the back of Maggie’s closet. Beth practiced every day for weeks—in the attic, in the barn in front of the disinterested heifer, by the swimming hole, by herself in the living room. She loved the way her arms stretched out like vines, the way her feet curled into graceful little boats, how easy the imaginary cello cries moved through her body and into her movements. 

Then, after the first recital, Beth saw herself dancing on tape. Her daddy filmed it with his handheld and Beth watched it immediately, her high bun still impeccably slick. She saw the vine arms and the boat feet, but she had no musicality, no fluidity. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes as she saw her awkward, jerky movements no real ballerina could ever produce, and knew right then and there that she’d never set foot on a recital stage again. Her dance career finished. She had no grace— except while killing walkers. 

There’s something tinged sad about that fact; her Tchaikovsky is gunshots and the echoing pounding in her temple. 

The second magazine empties too quickly. Four walkers stand between her and a line of black cars with crosses. The walkers hiss and spit as if they’re pissed off she’s cleared most of the lot. Beth reaches for the baton at her waist. It’s clumsy in her bandaged hand. She approaches the nearest walker with long steps and uses the momentum to power her swing. Its so decrepit that the head caves in like paper mache, not bone. She doesn’t stop. Beth turns on the ball of her foot, very unlike that gawky ballerina she saw on tape, and smashes the baton into the next skull. It takes two tries, but the crunch is triumphant. 

Her body feels like it’s on fire, like it’s made of screaming musculature. The asphalt is steaming beneath her boots. The sky is a blistering blue. All she knows is _survive, survive, survive._ She’s going to make it. 

Then the baton crashes into the chin of the next walker on an upswing, slipping out of her hand and flying with the jaw a few feet away, out of reach. Gait interrupted, the walker stumbles to the ground where Beth doesn’t hesitate to smash her boot into its nose. 

_Survive, survive, survive._

She hears the weighty, cumbersome growl before her gaze lifts from the pulpy mess on the ground. It’s a sound that feels dense and corpulent; it teases at her adrenaline and makes it cold with fear. Her head snaps back with the shock of it. 

Beth trips backward with a shout. A gargantuan walker lurches towards her, still fleshy and well over a foot taller than her, its beefy hand outstretched like a claw. Its boots slip into the blood of her other kills as it releases another deep, famished groan from its sickly yellowed lips, the skin chapped and flaking off in strips down to its throat. 

The guns are empty. The baton is too many steps too far. The flashlight fell from her pocket during the fight. She can run, maybe, but the walker’s close enough for her to see its eyelashes clumped together with something like puss. 

There’s no time. 

_Survive._  

With a strangled cry, she leaps at walker and rams her casted hand forcefully into its eye socket as hard she can so that it sings with new reverberating pain, her other hand coming to shove at its forehead, fingernails clawing into flesh that gives like clay. Drags it's nasty face down near enough to bite it back when its jaws snap at her neck. 

Again. Her hand comes out painted red. Thrusts the plaster right back into it. Again. The skull snaps like peanut brittle. Twists her cast and jimmies into the gelatinous mess, fingers wriggling. Again. Thrusts it right back. Screams from her belly, from her fear. That will to live. Desperation. Until the cast starts to fracture. She feels it loosen a bit around her wrist and doesn’t let it stop her jabbing motions, not until the monstrous walker seizes against her hands and then drops like a carcass from a hunt against her chest, its hair still tangled in her fingers. It slides heavily down her torso to her feet.

Atlanta looms silently ahead of the bloody lot, gray and labyrinthine, but tinged a fiery orange with the late afternoon sun. A city set on fire much like herself. Emboldened. Still standing. Forgotten.

The hospital is a quiet presence behind her and she doesn’t even need to turn around to know there’s no one in the windows. She fought too slow. Her family is gone in unprocessed grief and failure. She intuits that they’ll bail on the city quickly, nothing to hold them back, nothing to return for. For all they know and believe and saw with their own eyes—Beth Greene is dead. She’s gone. 

Her arms are unfurling wings in the gold light, held out from her body and rising up, one wrist coated crimson and leaking brain matter, and the other hand is gripping a torn scalp with glistening wet strings of hair rippling in the breeze. 

Her chest rises, up towards the sky like God’s pulling a string, and she shuts her eyes tightly, squeezes both hands tightly into fists, and then tosses it all away.  

Raw, but _alive_.

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have plans for this to be a Thing, and hopefully, it won't end up like my other thing...which was lost in the Great Laptop Death...along with so much other writing. 
> 
> yEAH  
> I've already cried about it.
> 
> Posted before final edits because I'm lazy. I'll return and make minor changes later.


End file.
